Last weekend, my boyfriend and I watched a program featuring Augusten Burroughs, the lionized author of Running With Scissors and other books. While he had moved away from the place he had been raised, ultimately he had moved back to his home town or city or whatever, where he could focus exclusively and in every painful detail recount every embarrassment or humiliation that had befallen him. The interviewer credited Burroughs with taking the airing of these pains to whole new heights - to critical acclaim.

The interview included his older brother, who didn't always see in the same way the events Burroughs sometimes described - like events at their father's deathbed. With a reference to James Frey, the guy who fictionalized his "memoir", Burroughs bristled: "Every thing I wrote really happened! It is absolutely the truth!"

I haven't read his books, although friends in Canada sent me Scissors and another book (Dry?). And I haven't seen the movie. I'm sure they're great and eventually I will.

Last night, I watched two (!) interviews with disgraced Evangelical leader Ted Haggard. Guess there's a documentary due soon about his life post-New Life church, located in the city where I used to live. I remember the church rising up like a giant pole barn out of the prairie, the waving flags, the parking lots filling with charter buses, people praying for the unborn children.

More tales of compulsion and sexual abuse. Does sex when you're a child, even if you don't think of it as abuse, lead to bedwetting? I wondered. (This revelation had been a breakthrough in his therapy - ah, now we have a reason! for it all.)

So, I took down a Memoir I never finished & am trying it again. The Architect of Desire, by Suzanne Lessard, the great-granddaughter of Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White. (See one review here.) It also covers the sexual abuse ground and I remembered I had given up about halfway through last time because it struck me as caricatures of sex abuse. (Horrible I know, you're not supposed to question a Victim's victimhood.)

This time, I'm reading this as a work of fiction. I've just read a section about a woman who had written a "best-selling sex novel", ca. 1880. Now just what does that mean, I have to wonder, for those times? Or is Lessard using "sex" broadly. Did that author of more than a century ago use lots of allusion or repressed symbolism? Women whose diaphanous night-gowns were torn by thorns while riding powerful black steeds through dark woods, etc.

Next up after I'm done: Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher, which sounds like it will be the most truthful of them all.